"When everyone is agreed on something, it is probably wrong" (with a comment on the Tippit case)

[Greg Doudna]

"When everyone is agreed on something, it is probably wrong"

(From a blog post with that title, Vridar, 8/11/2020, https://vridar.org/2020/08/11/when-everyone-is-agreed-on-something-it-is-probably-wrong-thompsons-rule/)

START blog post--

Another Thompson aphorism: ‘When everyone is agreed on something, it is probably wrong’. In other words, as Thompson has also put it, ‘in our fields, if all are in agreement, it signifies that no one is trying to falsify the theory: an essential step in any scientific argument’.

That’s not being perverse. It’s about pausing when “things seem too good to be true” and taking time out to ask if “there has probably been a mistake”. (Gunn, @2 mins, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz6xUjJHTII)

"[U]ntil the Romans ultimately removed the right of the Sanhedrin to confer death sentences, a defendant unanimously condemned by the judges would be acquitted [14, Sanhedrin 17a], the Talmud stating ‘If the Sanhedrin unanimously find guilty, he is acquitted. Why? — Because we have learned by tradition that sentence must be postponed till the morrow in hope of finding new points in favour of the defence’."

 That practice could be interpreted as the Jewish judges being intuitively aware that suspicions about the process should be raised if the final result appears too perfect . . .

"[I]f too many judges agree, the system has failed and should not be considered reliable." (Gunn et al 2016)

 Or even more simply,

"They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made." (Zyga, 2016)

The opening quotation above is from a footnote to a chapter by Gregory Doudna in a newly published volume in honour of Thomas L. Thompson, Biblical Narratives, Archaeology & Historicity: Essays in Honour of Thomas L. Thompson (https://www.amazon.com/Biblical-Narratives-Archaeology-Historicity-Testament/dp/0567701778)

Doudna’s footnote continues:

"I thought of what I have come to call Thompson’s Rule when I encountered this scientific study showing that, as counterintuitive as it sounds, unanimous agreement actually does reduce confidence of correctness in conclusions in a wide variety of disciplines (Gunn et al. 2016)." (https://www.academia.edu/43060817/_Is_Josephuss_John_the_Baptist_Passage_a_Chronologically_Dislocated_Story_of_the_Death_of_Hyrcanus_II_)

The paper by Gunn and others is "Too good to be true: when overwhelming evidence fails to convince" (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2015.0748)

The argument of the paper (with my bolding in all quotations):

"Is it possible for a large sequence of measurements or observations, which support a hypothesis, to counterintuitively decrease our confidence? Can unanimous support be too good to be true? The assumption of independence is often made in good faith; however, rarely is consideration given to whether a systemic failure has occurred. Taking this into account can cause certainty in a hypothesis to decrease as the evidence for it becomes apparently stronger. We perform a probabilistic Bayesian analysis of this effect with examples based on (i) archaeological evidence, (ii) weighing of legal evidence and (iii) cryptographic primality testing. In this paper, we investigate the effects of small error rates in a set of measurements or observations. We find that even with very low systemic failure rates, high confidence is surprisingly difficult to achieve . . . ."

Sometimes as we find more and more agreement we can begin to lose confidence in those results. Gunn begins with a simple example in a presentation he gave in 2016 (link is to youtube video). Here is the key slide:

 

With a noisy voltmeter attempting to measure a very small voltage (nanovoltage) one would expect some variation in each attempted measurement. Without the variation, we can conclude something is wrong rather than that we have a precise measurement.

(. . .)

Here’s another interesting application: dangerous and utterly counterintuitive….

 

We can see the bias built into the lineup here — #3’s label is lower than the rest, drawing attention to him. 

"The researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.

"In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very large impact on the results overall. Specifically, they show that when only 1% of the line-ups exhibit a bias toward a particular suspect, the probability that the witnesses are correct begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications. Counterintuitively, if one of the many witnesses were to identify a different suspect, then the probability that the other witnesses were correct would substantially increase.

"The mathematical reason for why this happens is found using Bayesian analysis, which can be understood in a simplistic way by looking at a biased coin. If a biased coin is designed to land on heads 55% of the time, then you would be able to tell after recording enough coin tosses that heads comes up more often than tails. The results would not indicate that the laws of probability for a binary system have changed, but that this particular system has failed. In a similar way, getting a large group of unanimous witnesses is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, that it’s more likely that the system is unreliable.

"The researchers say that this paradox crops up more often than we might think. Large, unanimous agreement does remain a good thing in certain cases, but only when there is zero or near-zero bias. Abbott gives an example in which witnesses must identify an apple in a line-up of bananas—a task that is so easy, it is nearly impossible to get wrong, and therefore large, unanimous agreement becomes much more likely."

Removing the bias:

"On the other hand, a criminal line-up is much more complicated than one with an apple among bananas. Experiments with simulated crimes have shown misidentification rates as high as 48% in cases where the witnesses see the perpetrator only briefly as he runs away from a crime scene. In these situations, it would be highly unlikely to find large, unanimous agreement. But in a situation where the witnesses had each been independently held hostage by the perpetrator at gunpoint for a month, the misidentification rate would be much lower than 48%, and so the magnitude of the effect would likely be closer to that of the banana line-up than the one with briefly seen criminals."

END blog post

~ ~ ~

[gd speaking now]

Question from the above: do the Tippit crime scene eyewitnesses who identified Oswald as the man they saw fleeing the scene, gun in hand, establish Oswald was that man, all else aside? 

Remember: 

• A weapon of the same kind used in the killing of Tippit was disposed of suspiciously in a paper bag in downtown Dallas, unexplained, less than 18 hours later, in proximity to where Jack Ruby, the killer of Oswald the next day, was driving a self-confessed hit man in his car with him ... at about 5 a.m. Saturday Nov 23, 1963 ... and that revolver after having been turned in to the Dallas Police disappeared in police custody ... coverup! (but of what?)
• The self-confessed hit man accompanying Ruby driving in downtown Dallas at 5 a.m. at the same time a possible used murder weapon may have been thrown out of a car window where the car was driving, is known to have been mistakenly identified as Oswald by other witnesses on other, unrelated, occasions.
• That self-confessed hit man accompanying Ruby fled the state of Texas that morning, the morning of Nov 23, hours after the murder of Tippit and immediately after the unusual abandonment of a weapon that could have been the Tippit murder weapon.
• Fingerprints on the Tippit cruiser likely from the killer of Tippit are have long been established and known to not match to Oswald; Oswald is excluded as a match to those fingerprints.
• There are serious questions concerning the chain of custody of the shell hulls found at the crime scene, while in Dallas Police custody, reported matched to Oswald's revolver, suggesting very real plausibility of a police framing of Oswald after the arrest with respect to those shell hulls.
• From day one it never has made any sense, has had no satisfactory rational explanation, why Oswald would have gone to the scene of the Tippit killing at Tenth and Patton in the first place, why he would be there at all.
• Oswald is reported by a credible witness inside the Texas Theatre--which is where it is known he did go--to have been looking to meet someone, who most likely would have been the person in Carl Mather's car witnessed parked on N. Beckley not far from the theatre as if waiting for the time of a planned meeting at the theatre, i.e. Carl Mather of Collins Radio ... friend of Tippit.
• Tippit appears to have tried unsuccessfully to find Oswald in Oak Cliff (at Mather's instruction? to try to save Oswald's life?) prior to the killing of Tippit and Oswald's arrest in the theatre.
• Question: when the killer of Tippit ran into the Texas Theatre up into the balcony, was that Oswald on the main ground level, or a different guy in the balcony? When police swarmed the theatre minutes later and converged on Oswald on the main level, did they swarm on the right guy or the wrong guy?
• There was a guy in the balcony reported by a number of officers who told of seeing and encountering such a man. One officer who walked past him on the balcony stairs even mistakenly later thought the man he let walk past him coming out of the balcony as he went up into the balcony in search of the killer, was Oswald! What happened to the guy in the balcony? Could it be that he, not Oswald, was the killer of Tippit? No record of his name. Police paperwork of all theatre patrons' names and addresses, including that of the man in the balcony, disappeared. Coverup!
• Overwhelming police pressure to close the case on Oswald as the killer of Tippit. Overwhelming pressure to go in no other investigative direction--such as where the fingerprints or the paper-bag revolver or interviews of the theatre witnesses might lead. Not good!
• The way in which Tippit's cruiser slowed and stopped suggests Tippit could have been there to meet someone and was flagged down by someone waiting, i.e. Tippit moving into an ambush.
• The autopsy done on Tippit, whose findings were kept secret until belatedly come to light, found a bullet to Tippit's head that has the appearance of a professional execution, not an impulse or panic killing of Tippit.
• The street address of the house at which Tippit stopped his cruiser when he was killed, 410 E. 10th, was given by Ruby two days later, on Sun Nov 24 the day Ruby killed Oswald, as the home address of one of his dancers, a friend of the self-confessed hitman who was in Ruby's car the morning of Sat Nov 23 and fled Texas. That dancer is not verified to have actually lived at the address Ruby gave and is believed to have lived elsewhere in Oak Cliff. But the point of interest is Ruby gave that address where Tippit stopped his cruiser when he was killed, "410-1/2 10th", as that dancer's home address. Why that mistake?

And with that as background, return to the Tippit crime scene witnesses' identifications of Oswald out of lineups ... do they establish Oswald as the gunman seen fleeing the scene in the direction of the Texas Theatre?

Is the above a recipe for arriving at a just conviction of Oswald in the Tippit case? Or are these facts suggestive of what an Innocence Project would in due course of time find to have been a wrongful conviction of an innocent man (referring narrowly to innocence in the killing of officer Tippit), if it had gone to trial and a jury had found Oswald guilty of the murder of officer Tippit? 

Edited October 1, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Ron Ege]

Greg, thanks.

A superb summation - and great questions.

I read a long time ago Tippit may have been killed by a former/another current paramour of a woman with whom Tippit was having an affair.  Has that theory been 100 percent disproved?  Admittedly, the pretty somewhat obvious coup de grace shot to Tippit's head doesn't seem to quite fit that scenario.

And is there not the theory that Tippit was killed by a fellow police officer?

There are so-o many questions that are left unanswered in the "official story".

Tippit and Mather's association known.  Ruby and Craford's association known.  Ruby's ties to the mob/gunrunning/ Cuba, awareness of the FPCC, and Oswald's ties, also.  Craford and Oswald's links to intelligence.  Goes on and on.

All this explained by Sixth Degrees of Separation?

I've yet to read anything, that makes sense that is, that LHO had the demeanor of cold blooded/no conscience killer that could nonchalantly gun down the POTUS and then just a little later, a police officer - on his way to watch an afternoon matinee.

 

[Guest]

Wasn't there also something about a policeman guarding a private house there in the neighbourhood (he couldn't remember the exact house... ahum...) ?  There was also his girlfriend visiting with his lunch ?  I have read about it, never understood what that was all about, strange.  Don't know if that was investigated to the bone ?   For all I remember that guy was a Tippit colleague, could have had another relation as well. 

Edited October 2, 2022 by Jean Paul Ceulemans

[Greg Doudna]

10 hours ago, Ron Ege said:

A superb summation - and great questions.

I read a long time ago Tippit may have been killed by a former/another current paramour of a woman with whom Tippit was having an affair.  Has that theory been 100 percent disproved?  Admittedly, the pretty somewhat obvious coup de grace shot to Tippit's head doesn't seem to quite fit that scenario.

Thanks Ron. On the affair, here is my transcript of Larry Ray Harris who, along with Ken Holmes Jr. broke that story--Harris speaking at a 1994 conference at 53:10f here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1gy-rFf_qQ. The version Harris gives is a different version, probably more accurate, than the story as given in Myers' book which differs on key points. Its an area that would have remained personal to the families if not for the JFK assassination and Myers tries to be sensitive to the family, which is how I interpret the discrepancies on points of fact in Myers' version. This is also discussed in McBride's book. Here is Larry Ray Harris:

"Tippit had worked at Austin's Bar-B-Q, had become romantically involved with a waitress, (who was) estranged and later divorced from her husband. It was a very serious relationship. Tippit wanted to marry her, wanted to divorce his wife and marry her. She declined his marriage proposal, because of his family, his career, the relationship tailed off. She realized in September '63 that she was pregnant. And its just a messy situation. She told the House Select Committee that she and her husband, after she and Tippit broke up, she and her husband got back together in the summer of '63. Well, Ken Holmes, Jr. and I--Ken did a lot of the work with me on the Tippit murder back in the 1970s and on this story specifically. He and I interviewed the former husband of the lady and he was very adamant in telling that they didn't get back together until the next day after Tippit was killed, that he went over there and took her to the funeral home. And she just became hysterical and broke down and told him she was pregnant by Tippit. So they reconciled. The child was born seven months later and they raised it as if it was their own. And you know its just a situation that existed, and had that situation been known to investigators in 1964 it might have placed the Tippit murder in an altogether different light."

Edited October 3, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Greg Doudna]

Ruminations on Tippit meeting his killer . . .

My take on Tippit and the waitress (Witherspoon): it cannot have been the cause of Tippit's death due to no evidence pointing toward the husband, and so much circumstantial evidence tying the killing of Tippit to the JFK assassination. (The timing; the killer of Tippit immediately reloading and going to the balcony of the Texas Theatre where I think he intended to kill Oswald right then; an apparent connection of Tippit with Oswald at the Dobbs House restaurant near Oswald's rooming house on Beckley where both Tippit and Oswald were regulars in the morning according to a waitress there who knew Tippit, that location being out of Tippit's area underscoring the possible connection to Oswald also a regular there for coffee in mornings.) I assume as working hypothesis that the killing of Tippit is parallel to the killing of Oswald in both being witness-silencings carried out by the same mob-related interests doing "cleanup" after the assassination. 

Where a woman might enter the Tippit killing picture might be in the unclear matter of what brought Tippit to Tenth and Patton at the particular time he was killed. The conventional picture is of course that nothing did, that it was Tippit driving randomly in a patrol area and saw a man walking strangely and stopped to check him out, who was Oswald who shot and killed Tippit. But set that aside and on the what I consider more likely scenario that Tippit was ambushed, a hit on Tippit, something had to have brought him there at that time, or else he was a regular there at a certain time and someone was lying in wait based on pattern or habitual behavior. There is also evidence from four witnesses that Tippit was a regular in the Tenth and Patton neighborhood prior to the day he was killed (Scoggins, V. Davis, Jimmy Burt, and Acquilla Clemons), without to my knowledge any real explanation having been established for that. Since Tippit was, with apologies to the Tippit family, something of a womanizer, one of the possible explanations on the short list of why he might have been a regular in that neighborhood could be a woman, though there is no woman known to live in that neighborhood linked to Tippit. Another possibility could be Tippit had a planned meeting either at or in front of a certain address--say, 410 E. 10th--say for 1:15 pm on Fri Nov 22. Tippit was friends with the dispatcher, Murray. On the puzzle of why Murray dispatched Tippit to Oak Cliff on Nov 22 in the seemingly strange way that happened in the police radio tapes, I have wondered if that could be as simple as Tippit quietly asking Murray in advance, as a favor, to assign him to Oak Cliff that day (so that Tippit could have that personal meeting at 10th and Patton while he was on patrol in the Oak Cliff area, not that he would necessarily tell Murray that reason). It could be conjectured that something like that was the mechanism for luring Tippit to that location and time where he was ambushed and killed.

The killer of Tippit was seen walking westward on E. 10th Street before getting to the place where he killed Tippit. The killer was on foot, seen walking. What point east of where Tippit was killed did the killer originate in that walking? It certainly makes no sense on a map that the killer walking west on 10th started from Oswald's rooming house. But the killer did come directly from the direction and vicinity of Jack Ruby's apartment. I don't know whether that is coincidence or not.  

The change of direction of the killer walking on the sidewalk on E 10th which supposedly attracted Tippit's attention and was why Tippit stopped to check him out--that reconstruction--I have a simpler solution: the killer came from the east walking west, timing his walking to arrive at a particular address at an agreed time Tippit was scheduled to pull up at that address. The killer simply got there slightly before Tippit's patrol car did, walked beyond and turned back, killing time so to speak in order to be at the address to meet Tippit when Tippit arrived. Tippit's patrol car pulled up by accident just as the killer had turned back heading east on 10th to return to the particular address, and Tippit's car heading east on 10th pulled up alongside the killer and they spoke briefly and then Tippit got out of his cruiser and was ambushed/killed by the killer. 

Edited October 3, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Ron Ege]

Greg, interesting conjecture - re what brought Tippit and his killer together.  It certainly makes more sense than the official story.

For me, the killer adding the coup de grace shot makes a lot more sense if the meeting was prescheduled as a hit, with Tippit totally unsuspecting.

For him, "There is no such thing as coincidence, only hitsuzen" - comes to mind.

[Greg Doudna]

Ruminations on learning the true killer of Tippit

Those who consider it settled that Oswald killed Tippit explain the lack of match of Oswald to the patrol car fingerprints in terms of it is not proven that those fingerprints came from the killer. Which is true but does not negate that there is a good likelihood that they are the killer's fingerprints. I think the Dallas Police crime lab realized immediately the first weekend of Nov 22-24 that Oswald was excluded as a match to those fingerprints but did not report that, instead said the prints were all too smudged to know, and it was not until 1994, published 1998 by Myers, that the exclusion of Oswald as a match became known from a latent fingerprint expert who easily did so (suggesting the exclusion may have been equally easily done in Nov 1963).

There has been no interest in finding to whom those fingerprints match. Just none. In the year 2022, all this time, 59 years, there has been not one single reported attempt, ever, to find an identification or match to those prints, not by the FBI, not by anyone, even though the prints are published and accessible.

Not one of the Tippit crime scene witnesses who picked Oswald out in lineups as the fleeing gunman knew Oswald previously or had better than brief fleeting glimpses. And there are so many instances of demonstrable mistaken identifications of Oswald by people after the assassination. If the killer of Tippit had some rough resemblance in physical description to Oswald such that witnesses could confuse, naturally they are going to like Helen Markham pick the one that looks most closely like what they remembered out of the choices. Innocence Project exonerations of innocent persons wrongly convicted involve reversal of mistaken eyewitness positive identifications in a majority of cases. 

The self-confessed hit man accompanying Jack Ruby hours after the Tippit killing (Ruby himself being the killer of Oswald the next day on Sunday), when Ruby drove that self-confessed hit man at the odd time of 5 a.m. on the morning of Sat Nov 23, in the vicinity of where that very night someone for no known reason mysteriously tossed a revolver of the same kind that killed Tippit, in a paper bag out a car window (reconstructed mechanism for how that paper-bag revolver ended up in the street in the middle of the night) . . . that self-confessed hit man, who fled Texas that same morning, was close enough in physical description to Oswald to have separately been mis-identified as Oswald by witnesses who saw him in the early a.m. hours of Nov 22 with Ruby at the Lucas B&B Restaurant; and witnesses who saw him earlier with Ruby at the Contract Electronics store, to name just two instances in which it is certain a man mistakenly identified by witnesses as Oswald was not Oswald but was the self-confessed hit man recently employed by Ruby. What is the difference between those witnesses who said they had seen Oswald when they had really seen the self-confessed hit man associated with Ruby, and the witnesses seeing the fleeing gunman from the killing of Tippit who said they had seen Oswald?

What is the difference? Only that in one class of cases it went as far as picking out of lineups and, if Oswald had not been executed Sunday morning by the self-confessed hit man's employer and driver, could have led to a murder conviction of Oswald by a jury and capital sentence. The other class of cases simply were FBI interview reports of witnesses saying they had seen Oswald which were correctly dismissed as mistaken identifications and nothing further came of it.

There have been plenty of articles on the flawed methods of the Tippit crime scene witness lineups; the high rates of convictions of arrested suspects under Captain Fritz involving innocent persons in the mix; and the extraordinary pressure on Leavelle (in charge of the Tippit murder investigation) and co. from Fritz and higherups to, in Leavelle's words, wrap up Oswald real tight on Tippit, because of fear that the case against Oswald for the JFK assassination might be tougher to carry to conviction at trial.

No wonder there would be no interest in an identification of who left the fingerprints on Tippit's patrol car that look like they could be from the killer, once it was realized there was no match to Oswald.

Edited October 5, 2022 by Greg Doudna

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

• Fingerprints on the Tippit cruiser likely from the killer of Tippit are have long been established and known to not match to Oswald; Oswald is excluded as a match to those fingerprints.

 

There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the partial prints lifted from the patrol car ever belonged to the killer.  No witness ever said the killer touched the front passenger fender.  Why would the killer touch the front passenger fender?  These partial prints are not "likely" to have come from the killer, despite the claim by Doudna.

Edited October 7, 2022 by Bill Brown
typo

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

• That self-confessed hit man accompanying Ruby fled the state of Texas that morning, the morning of Nov 23, hours after the murder of Tippit and immediately after the unusual abandonment of a weapon that could have been the Tippit murder weapon.

 

No.  The revolver taken from Oswald during the scuffle inside the theater is the murder weapon.  The shell casings in evidence tell you so (per Frazier, Killion, Cunningham and Nicol).

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

• There are serious questions concerning the chain of custody of the shell hulls found at the crime scene, while in Dallas Police custody, reported matched to Oswald's revolver, suggesting very real plausibility of a police framing of Oswald after the arrest with respect to those shell hulls.

 

Please explain the "serious questions" surrounding the chain of possession of the two shell casings found by the Davis girls.

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

Oswald is reported by a credible witness inside the Texas Theatre--which is where it is known he did go--to have been looking to meet someone...

 

What "credible witness" said Oswald was looking to meet someone?  What makes this "witness" credible?  How would this "witness" know what Oswald was looking to do?

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

• The street address of the house at which Tippit stopped his cruiser when he was killed, 410 E. 10th, was given by Ruby two days later, on Sun Nov 24 the day Ruby killed Oswald, as the home address of one of his dancers, a friend of the self-confessed hitman who was in Ruby's car the morning of Sat Nov 23 and fled Texas. That dancer is not verified to have actually lived at the address Ruby gave and is believed to have lived elsewhere in Oak Cliff. But the point of interest is Ruby gave that address where Tippit stopped his cruiser when he was killed, "410-1/2 10th", as that dancer's home address. Why that mistake?

 

Cite please, for Ruby giving anyone the address of 410 E. 10th Street.

Edited October 7, 2022 by Bill Brown

[Bill Brown]

"When everyone is agreed on something, it is probably wrong"

 

Greg, regarding the Tippit witnesses supposedly agreeing on everything, the aphorism you cite is invalid.

 

For the sake if the point you are trying to make, you have to take all of the witnesses into account (not only those who said the man was indeed Lee Oswald).  Jimmy Burt, Bill Smith, Domingo Benavides, L.J. Lewis and Robert Brock... all five of these witnesses stated that they couldn't say one way or the other if the man they saw was Lee Oswald.

 

Because of this, your entire point is moot.

Edited October 7, 2022 by Bill Brown

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

But set that aside and on the what I consider more likely scenario that Tippit was ambushed, a hit on Tippit, something had to have brought him there at that time, or else he was a regular there at a certain time and someone was lying in wait based on pattern or habitual behavior.

 

Greg, Jimmy Burt said the man who would eventually kill Tippit was walking from east to west on Tenth.  Burt said he saw the man walking on the sidewalk on the south side of Tenth a full block to the east of the shooting scene (walking west, toward the eventual shooting scene). 

 

Lying in wait?  What?

 

[Bill Brown]

Greg Doudna said:

 

Another possibility could be Tippit had a planned meeting either at or in front of a certain address--say, 410 E. 10th--say for 1:15 pm on Fri Nov 22. Tippit was friends with the dispatcher, Murray. On the puzzle of why Murray dispatched Tippit to Oak Cliff on Nov 22 in the seemingly strange way that happened in the police radio tapes, I have wondered if that could be as simple as Tippit quietly asking Murray in advance, as a favor, to assign him to Oak Cliff that day (so that Tippit could have that personal meeting at 10th and Patton while he was on patrol in the Oak Cliff area, not that he would necessarily tell Murray that reason). It could be conjectured that something like that was the mechanism for luring Tippit to that location and time where he was ambushed and killed.

 

Just a heads up... the dispatcher's last name was Jackson, not Murray.